Ignacio Ellacuría

Ignacio Ellacuría (November 9, 1930 – November 16, 1989) was a Spanish-Salvadoran Jesuit, philosopher, and theologian who worked as a professor and rector at the Universidad Centroamericana "José Simeón Cañas" (UCA), a Jesuit university in El Salvador founded in 1965. He and five other Jesuits and two women were assassinated by Salvadoran soldiers in the closing years of the Salvadoran Civil War.

His work was defining for the shape UCA took in its first years of existence and the years to come. Ellacuría was also responsible for the development of formation programs for priests in the Jesuit Central American province.

Biography Ellacuría joined the Jesuits in 1947 and was commissioned to the Central American republic of El Salvador in 1948. He lived and worked there for much of his life until his assassination in 1989. In 1958, Ellacuría studied theology with Vatican II theologian Karl Rahner in Innsbruck, Austria. He also lived in Ecuador and Spain.

Ellacuría's academic work was an important contribution to "Liberation Philosophy". This school of philosophy stems from the work of Augusto Salazar Bondy and Leopoldo Zea. It focuses on liberating the oppressed in order "to reach the fullness of humanity". Ellacuría was also a strong supporter and contributor to Liberation Theology. There are different types of Latin American liberation philosophy. Ellacuría's thought represents one of the currents within this philosophical tradition.

The political implications of Ellacuría's commitment to his ideas met strong opposition from the conservative religious and political forces in El Salvador. This opposition led to Ellacuría's murder by the Salvadoran army in 1989 at his residence in UCA along with five other fellow Jesuit priests and two employees.

Their murder marked a turning point in the Salvadoran Civil War. On the one hand, it increased international pressures on the Salvadoran government to sign peace agreements with the guerrilla organisation FMLN. On the other, it helped make Ellacuría's ideas (until then known only in Latin America and Spain) known worldwide.

Philosophy Monument of Ignacio Ellacuría.Ellacuría's philosophy takes as a starting point Xavier Zubiri's (1898–1983) critique of Western philosophy. For Zubiri, ever since Parmenides, Western thought separated sensing from intelligence. This error led to two results. The first one was what Zubiri called "the logification of intelligence" and the second one was what he called "the entification of reality".

The "logification of intelligence" implied that intellect was reduced to logos. This view led philosophers to believe that what they called "Being" was the cause of reality, and this in turn, explained the confusion of metaphysics with ontology. and Amartya Sen's notion of development as freedom.

Theology As many other theologians of his generation, Ellacuría intended to construct a new theology, which he called a historical theology. Methodologically, his view of history followed the Hegelian dialectic tradition, that culminated in Marx's historical materialism. However, in terms of content, he was also critical of Hegel's eurocentric view of history. Ellacuría rejected as well Marx's view of human beings as objects of their material conditions. He stressed the importance of conscience, human praxis and its possibilities for influencing the course of history, and thereby material conditions themselves. Critics have accused him of contaminating theology with Marxism. His thought shares with Marxism a common Hegelian view of history as progress brought about by overcoming contradictions. Some, as Enrique Dussel, would claim that the similarities between liberation theology and Marx's thought are to be found in common origins of the narrative of liberation in the Judeo-Christian tradition of thought.

By "historical theology", Ellacuría meant a way of making theology: to reflect about faith from the historical present and to reflect about the historical present from faith. According to him, all theology is conditioned by its historical present. Historical theology intends to acquire conscience about its historical context and to incorporate it fully. The concept of locus theologicus (theological place) is very important in this theology.

According to Ellacuría, the value of the Old Testament is not reduced with the New Testament. The New Testament makes the community character of faith from the Old Testament something radical and universal. It makes it radical, because it establishes that the alliance of God with people is much more than a simple code of laws and liturgical rituals; it is an invitation to justice and charity, not as exceptional practices, but as a stable structure. That is why this alliance is established in a law. It makes the faith universal, because the New Testament is communicated to every human being, independently of race, culture, sex, religion or social condition.

Ellacuría believed that a university cannot always and in every place be the same. It must constantly look at its own peculiar historical reality. The Third World is characterized more by oppression than by liberty, more by poverty than by abundance. According to Ellacuría, in such a context a university must do everything possible so that liberty overcomes oppression. He added that the university must carry out this general commitment with the means uniquely at its disposal. As an intellectual community, the university must analyse causes; use imagination and creativity together to discover remedies to problems; communicate a consciousness that inspires the freedom of self-determination; educate professionals with a conscience, who will be the immediate instruments of such a transformation; and constantly hone an educational institution that is both academically excellent and ethically oriented.